Thursday, January 13, 2011

Microscope records firing of thousands of individual neurons in 3-D | KurzweilAI: The imaging technology they developed is called multifocal two-photon microscopy with spatio-temporal excitation-emission multiplexing — STEM for short. The researchers modified two-photon laser-scanning microscopes to image fluorescent calcium dyes inside the neurons, and came up with a way to split the main laser beam into four smaller beamlets. This allowed them to record four times as many brain cells as the earlier version, or four times faster. In addition, they used a different beam to record neurons at different depths inside the brain, giving a 3-D effect, which had never been done previously.

“Most video cameras are designed to capture an image at 30 pictures per second. What we did was speed that up by 10 times to roughly 250 pictures per second,” Arisaka said. “And we are working on making it even faster.”

The result, he said, “is a high-resolution three-dimensional video of neuronal circuit activity in a living animal.”